


Full Circle

by Byrcca



Series: Fixed It For Ya! (You Know What You Did/Didn’t Do) [4]
Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Beyer-verse, F/M, Full Circle, Unworthy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-30 06:56:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14491320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Byrcca/pseuds/Byrcca
Summary: SPOILERS. This is in response to something I thought should have been addressed in Full Circle and Unworthy, and while it’s not a missing scene per se, I’m throwing it in here anyway. I suppose, technically, it lives as a missing scene from Unworthy but whatever.  SPOILERS for the books.





	Full Circle

~~~ 

She was not quite two years old when she forgot him, and it broke his heart. He hadn’t seen her in six months, had seen little of her since he’d left Boreth regardless. With the politics involved in _Voyager’s_ assignment to survey the Yaris Nebula they hadn’t been able to get together, and although B’Elanna made a point to talk to Miral about him and show her pictures of him, he had become some sort of abstract concept to her. She’d come around after a while, permitted him to touch her, then to hold her, but the small gains were agonizing to him, and B’Elanna felt guilt slam into her at the pain in his eyes. Miral loved her holographic nanny more than she loved her daddy. 

B’Elanna had immediately thought to make a hologram of Tom so Miral could play with him, so he could feed and bathe her and rock her to sleep. But she rejected the idea because it wouldn’t have been _him_ , it would have been _it_ , and Miral wouldn’t have understood. She would have made memories that Tom couldn’t share, with a projection of light, and it would have felt like she had stolen Miral from him all over again. So she’d taken holophotos of the two of them together and recorded Tom reading to her so Miral could watch the vids later and know how much her daddy loved her. 

When he had to go, she had persuaded him to leave his sweater behind—he’d been dressed in civvies figuring his uniform would call unwanted attention to himself—and she had fashioned it into a lovey for their daughter. She would wrap her in it when she rocked her, and tuck it around her for naps. She found a spare cushion, not easy to fit a spare anything in their little ship, and used it as a slipcover so Miral could lean against it when B’Elanna read to her. And all the while Miral was imprinting his face and voice and scent in her memory. And so was B’Elanna. 

She hadn’t dared put the sweater through the ‘fresher in case it lost Tom’s scent, though it certainly could have used a cleaning. But even though his familiar scent had faded, B’Elanna liked to think it had been _absorbed_ by them both, a trace of him was still there and she took comfort in it. And on nights when Miral was safely tucked into her bunk, B’Elanna hugged it tightly and wept. She didn’t indulge in feeling sorry for herself often, but when she did Tom’s sweater was her companion in misery. 

And she had only herself to blame. Tom had tried again and again to convince her to come with him on _Voyager_ , to make her believe that they would be protected and safe, surrounded by old friends who would give their lives for them. But B’Elanna believed the opposite: that she would draw danger to her friends by being near them, that her being there would cause their deaths, so she had hidden and then ran. It was the antithesis of what it meant to be an honorable Klingon, to run from danger, but B’Elanna couldn’t take the chance, couldn’t bear the risk that the Warriors of Gre’thor might kill her friends in their attempt to take her daughter. So, she’d run. 

She was finishing the last of the unpacking, the _Home Free_ finally cleared of the clutter she had felt was absolutely necessary accompany her on her journey to Tom. An ensign she didn’t know had been assigned to pack up their belongings— _really, B’Elanna_ , she thought, _of course you don’t know him, even Harry got his long deserved promotion_ and she couldn’t find _anything_ she was looking for. But Tom’s old sweater wasn’t just anything. For a while, it had been everything.

For the last few days, now that she was feeling better, Miral had been distracted by the novelty of being on such a huge ship and meeting strangers who acted like friends, but now she was asking for her _dada_ , and B’Elanna had been running around their quarters like a targ with its tail on fire looking for it. She had a sneaking horror that she’d left it on New Talax. She certainly had a clear memory of Miral hugging in while she was in their hospital. 

Miral had confused the ephemeral, Tom’s scent, with the permanent object, Tom’s sweater, and insisted on calling _it_ dada. Half a year ago Miral had given up the ‘blankie’ incarnation, and had insisted on stuffing a cushion in the body of the sweater, leaving the arms out so she (refusing her mother’s help) could tie them around her waist, the cushion positioned on her back. She would walk around the shuttle declaring herself a turtle—a label that had made B’Elanna cringe the first two times Miral had said it before she told herself to get over it already—carrying her stack of (real paper) Franklin the Turtle books, a gift from Tom’s parents when she’d been a baby. 

Meeting Tom’s family had given B’Elanna a new understanding and appreciation of his quirks and, during her rare flights of fancy, she wondered what her father had betrayed about her own psyche to Tom. 

She finally found the sweater, cushion in place, arms stretched and tied around its padding, in a crate of Miral’s outgrown clothing. She had no idea how it got there, and had no memory of making the decision to clutter the small shuttle with useless items like outgrown baby clothes, but there it was. She sagged with relief. She was about to call Miral when the doors slid open and Tom walked in. 

“Hey,” he said, coming up behind her and folding her in a sneak-attack hug. He wrapped his arms around her from behind, and dropped kisses on her cheek and neck before he burrowed his nose into her shoulder.

“What are you doing here?” she asked with a smile. She craned her neck and returned his kiss. “Is it dinner time already?”

“I missed you, too, honey.” he replied.

“Sorry,” she said, turning in his arms to kiss him properly. The cushion got in the way.

“What is this?” Tom asked, tugging it from her hands. “Hey, that’s my old sweater. I think?”

It looked like a well stuffed rag. It was stained and pilled, the edges of the cuffs frayed. There was a hole in the upper right shoulder, and the stitches had ravelled back to create a ten centimeter vertical ladder from the strands of yarn. Miral had liked to weave her fingers through it. 

“It is,” B’Elanna confirmed. 

“You know, we can replicate another one. It would be a mercy.”

She gave him a peck on the cheek. “Watch this.” At Tom’s raised eyebrow, she grinned. “Miral!” she called. “Guess what I found.”

Miral came streaking out of her bedroom shouting “Dada!” as soon as she saw her old lovey in her father’s hands. He grinned and opened his arms only to have her zoom up to him, rip the cushion from his hand and spin in a circle. In her joy she hugged it tightly to her chest. “Dadadadadadada!” she exclaimed. 

“You’re daddy,” B’Elanna reminded him, taking in his confusion.

Miral was prancing around the living area planting loud, smacking kisses on the cushion. She finally plopped on the floor with her lovey in her lap and petted it. “I missed you so much,” she said, her little face all seriousness. 

It wasn’t lost on Tom that those were the first words he’d spoken to her when he’d seen her after a year apart. He traded a look with his wife. “She either needs a sibling or a puppy,” he said. 

B’Elanna laughed and pulled his head down for a proper ‘welcome home’ kiss. “I like making babies better than making puppies, but if you’re game to try…?”

Tom grinned, love and heat shining in his eyes. “When’s her bedtime?” he asked. Then he swooped in for another kiss as their daughter sat at their feet. 

~~~~

**Author's Note:**

> I will gripe that I spent a not inconsiderable amount of time trying to pin down Miral’s age for the opening line of this fic. Pocket Full of Lies is set in June and July of 2382, and opens with the birth of (forever Joe) Michael Paris. Tom? thinks that Miral ‘will turn 4 in a few weeks’ placing her birth roughly end of June to mid July 2378. In the next novel, set in August, she’s already four. 
> 
> KJ visits B’Elanna in Colorado on April 7, 2379, so Miral would be not quite one year old, but walking (possible) and naming wildflowers (it really is a sweet scene). BUT, in a sudden reversal, when Tom visits them on April 24, 2380 (she’s almost two) she can’t pronounce banana. (Which is also sweet and would have been lovely if she had been six months younger, but we can’t all have a child who spoke in full sentences at 18 mos and carried on conversations with stranger moms in mall food courts at twenty-four months: “You have a lovely baby. I like his hair. His cheeks are soooo sweet. What’s his name?”
> 
> Then, insult to injury, she’s suddenly 3 ½ when B’Elanna meets up with _Voyager_ in the DQ. (They left for the DQ rendezvous in May 2381 and it couldn’t have taken them 7 months to reach Tom’s coordinates). Even accounting for the several weeks she spent on New Talax with Neelix, the math doesn’t add up. Especially since that would give her about five months (she tells her father was 23 weeks in Author Author) to get pregnant and birth her son two or three weeks before Miral turns four. 
> 
> The thing that seriously bugs me is this: nowhere could I find an official, canonical calendar date for when _Voyager_ makes it home. Which is also Miral’s birthday. And there should be one. Nothing points to _Voyager_ being the red-headed stepchild of Trek more than this. It’s not only sloppy, it’s lazy, which is worse imo. I’ve read July, I’ve read December. I choose July.
> 
> End rant. (but only because it’s longer than the story)


End file.
